It ain't Burroughs but....

“Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer’s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.”

“... so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts . Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?”
“You come up with a bleak fact Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge - not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. Technology won’t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with (sleek, high powered speedboats).
“It was OK Travis, when the world couldn’t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? ‘Sorry, You’re a little too late. We used it all up all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well materially, as we once did. And now as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”
John MacDonald “The Scarlet Ruse” 1973

Oh happy, happy XMAS.

Damn Essay

AM earworm (You’ve Got To) Hide Your Love Away - Lennon & McCartney

It wasn’t really my intention to get up this early. Given, the cats were doing the usual 6:14 am, exploratory, breakfast bid for attention. I can usually growl, turn over, cover my head and get another hour though. But the brain engine started revving. The volume on the earworm went up. And I had to pee.
Upon returning to bed people were long and loudly laughing outside my window and I thought to myself “who laughs like that at 6:15 in the morning? They must be trippin’ or something.” Then I wanted to get up, to spy on the laughers, to see if they were tweaked. I hope not cuz they were pushing a baby carriage begging the question “where in the world are you taking your baby at 6:16 in the morning anyway?” Maybe to church.

Now I’m up. The cats are fed and Little ghee has performed the obligatory breakfast dance. My own stomach starts growling warningly and the roommate clogged the sink so dishes wait in a pile for his return from work to fix his screwup.

And that brings us to the subject that is on my mind of late. Lying. Why do people so casually do it? I, myself, cannot escape culpability on this. I admit I am a fan of the sin of omission if it’s going to prevent a big problem. BUT (and it’s a biggish but) that is usually a deliberate, planned maneuver to avoid hurting someone's feelings or putting them on the defensive. After spending many years purging myself of the lying factor (apparently there’s a gene for it in my family or something), I became what some friends and coworkers called “ the queen of no tact”. It is a fact that rabid, ruthless, truth telling is most unwelcome in our society. It is however interesting to note that several of the people who shamed me most often and most enthusiastically about my brutal truthing were in the final analysis found to be avid and compulsive liars themselves. I adopted a “shut my mouth” policy. Not overtly lying, but very frequently not telling my whole truths either.

I used to attribute much of it to astrology. There is an actual link in my view. A lot of water in your chart just seems to make truth a fluid substance. Try living with a lot of un-evolved Pisces if you don’t believe that. Try a quintuple Pisces if you want a most blatant example.

Now we add the idea that it is frequently attributable to “authoritarian” parents. If draconian punishments were administered the children lie instead of taking personal responsibility. This is something I’m going to be watching for in my lying studies in future. I think there is potentially a good deal of validity to this theorem.
For an example, I offer my observation of 2 brothers I know who lie in the same ways (casually, frequently and often easily detected and/or disproved) about the same kinds of things ( usually attempting to make themselves look better, cooler, smarter than they are and avoiding taking personal responsibility for their fuckups whether minute or large). Since I know their parents and have had the opportunity to hear many stories about their childhoods I feel that there certainly could be a correlation. The father is a bit of a raging ass.

Another factor I believe I detect a link with, is substance abuse. The most apparently upright citizen will easily lie if this issue is present. That one becomes a chicken and egg conundrum though. Did the self esteem problem that needs to be bolstered by lying occur before or after the substance issue?

And here’s one I really hate. I have been outright instructed to and expected to lie, by various bosses. This idea that lying is being built into business models really, really, bugs me. Force me to lie and eventually I’ll find a way to quit.

If I catch someone in one or two minor lies I can possibly, probably, mostly, overlook it . The circumstances, how comfortable or glib they seem to feel about it is a real tell. I try to accept people for the face that they want me to see. But I watch and frankly I’m judgmental. If the public face varies too much from the real face I stop trusting altogether.

Those are generally white and grey lies. My true horror is the black lie. Buddhism says this is pretending to have spiritual accomplishments you don’t. This can screw up peoples karma for millennia. Probably just not a good idea. I have seen many painful examples of this. My friend who committed suicide after the Rajneesh scandal destroyed what he believed in. Another who now hates Buddhism after following a false guru destroyed his family. Those are just a couple examples, I’ve seen a lot more. Obsessed as I am with cults and false prophets this is a big issue for me. The idea of one person throwing a huge monkey wrench into another’s spiritual growth for fun, profit and power is very alien and abhorrent.

I also think that lying for fun, profit and power about things like WMD’s or Jews, the Rom, and homosexuals being a problem or whether your industry is destroying the environment and your workers lives and health, which results in the death of anywhere from one to millions of human beings is pretty much the black lie as well. If I believed in Satan I would think it was downright Satanic. As it is I have to try to accept that those are just extreme examples of complete ignorance of the nature of reality and that the people committing such atrocities actually, truly, believe that this will somehow bring them happiness. It’s a hard pill to swallow but it is one of the only ways to try to retain compassion for them in their stupid, ignorant, destructive, negative, foolish, shortsighted, wickedness.

Which brings me to my question. By accepting all the little lies are we totally laying the foundation for the really big ones?

Platitudes and other lies

Another old saw that I find to actually be frequently true is “that if you want something done right do it yourself”.
As opposed to the one that just this second went by on the kiddie show I am watching; “hugs always make things better”. I call bullshit on that one.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the mind?"

Because I have Diabetes I have a really weird syndrome. Apparently every diabetic has their own glucose release cycle from the pancreas, So at some fairly regular time during the day there is a release, and a time when they are running a little short just prior to that. Ok that’s the part I sort of, understand. We think we’ve figured out that mine is just around dawn based on 2 things, one being that I always have really high morning sugars, which then somewhat normalize throughout the day. The other being that I usually have really fucked up dreams right before I wake up. They are not exactly nightmares but are usually full of stress, aggra, and anger. A lot of the time there is a lot of me yelling at people who I’m fairly pissed off at in real life.

Today it changed from weird to furious in short order, something about freaky dogs, a creepy basement and a refrigerator box, moving quickly to me fighting with a whole group of people I’m having an issue with, and I’m pulling hair, slapping faces and calling people pussies and jerks. I’d like to try to be philosophical about it, and say to myself;
“see, this is a great example of how NOT to handle this situation and how it accomplished NONE of your desired outcomes.”
But I have to admit that what it mostly does is make me kind of depressed that I still have these kinds of situations in my life needing to be handled at all, and that the shrieking, bar brawling, kicking ass and taking names, Stella is still right here, uncomfortably nearby, ready to go it. It seems a little ludicrous that she should be so close to the surface as it’s been years since I’ve been in a physical altercation.

People express such shock and disbelief when I say I’ve been clinically depressed since the age of six, or that I just got out of the hospital again, or that I’m a person just brimful of hatred and anger. And that, man, I am just an evil, grudge holder.
I’m always hearing the likes of;
“But you look so wel"
"But you’re always so cheerful"
"But you’re always trying to be helpful, kind and funny.”
I’m not wanting to be thought of as a big fake or two faced Janus type. (Who would?) But I’m certainly not about love, light and unicorns. I'm just trying really, really hard to not take it out on say, the retail public, or the people nonchalantly hanging round when the jerk almost runs me over in his SUV, on the cell phone, when I had the walk sign and he was turning. Because expressing it as rage, out loud, is cancerous and I know it. Given the chance, that shit spreads like lymphoma. We all know it, and we all live examples of it everyday.

So I guess Im just wanting to acknowledge that when you are polite, friendly and reasonable to me, that I really, really appreciate it. Because I SO very well know how difficult that can be to keep up. And that, my friends, is why I so loved it when Kosmo Kramer said;
“Manners are the oil that greases the wheels of civilization.”